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Different results

I have a adwords campaign running, started it last night, and I am seeing different results from GA from Adwords. One says I have x number of clicks for a campaign, and the other says I have y visitors from the same campaign. I must be missing something basic, right?

2 Responses

"There are a number of reasons why AdWords and Analytics may report different numbers of clicks and visits:

Clicks are not the same as VisitsGoogle AdWords tracks clicks, while Google Analytics tracks visits. If a user clicks on your ad twice within thirty minutes without closing his or her browser, this is registered by Analytics as one visit to your site, even if the user left your site and then returned shortly after. For example, if a user clicks on your ad once, clicks the back button, and then clicks your ad again, AdWords registers two clicks while Analytics registers one visit.

AdWords filters invalid clicks from your report, while Analytics shows all dataAdWords automatically filters certain clicks from your reports, while Analytics reports on all the resulting visits to your website. The clicks we filter from your AdWords reports are the occasional instances of someone clicking repeatedly on your ad in order to increase your costs or to increase your clickthrough rate. AdWords considers these clicks to be invalid and automatically filters them from your AdWords reports. You are not charged for these potentially invalid clicks.

You turned off auto-tagging for your URLs in your AdWords accountIf auto-tagging is turned off, and you did not manually tag the destination URLs with campaign tracking variables, the visit is not marked as Google CPC (clicks that came through from AdWords ads), but instead may be attributed to Google Organic (clicks from natural search results on Google.com). Ensure that your AdWords account either has auto-tagging turned on or has campaign tracking variables appended to the end of every destination URL."

It's possible that there is a time lag in the data reporting. If you look at multiple campaigns, does either GA or Adwords always show lower numbers? If so that's the one that is a bit slower in their reporting.

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